Blog Upgrade Update:…

Blog Upgrade Update: Things are moving along nicely. I’ve settled on WordPress, I’ve settled on a theme (Tiga), and I’ve got the theme working. I had a big problem in customizing it until I made a small change to the files. (Geek Speek: The theme has a special page it adds to WordPress theme administration where you fill in values for the stylesheet, which it then uses in the dynamic stylesheet style.php. Problem was that style.php was calling PHP’s output buffering routines, and for some reason, possibly related to my hosting system, nothing at all would come out. Thus, my page had no styles at all. I commented out the buffering calls, and voila. I’ll probably do what the theme author suggests and, once I have my layout pretty much set, run style.php, save the output as style.css, and then use that for the style sheet. Static pages, of course, respond faster than program output, and I have noticed that sometimes the program is too slow and again no style it output.)

WordPress has an option to require you to register (just nickname & e-mail) before you can post comments, and as annoying as I know that can be, I also know how much spam is a problem, even with countermeasures. (I’ve been the main spam handler at Stones Cry Out.) At the start, I’m going to make registration optional; anyone will be able to post as long as they enter a name and e-mail. Your first post will be automatically moderated, but once you have an approved post, you’ll be able to post unmoderated (well, depending on content, of course) as long as you use the same e-mail address. I’ve added a plug-in to allow you to subscribed to comments to a post (you’ll get an e-mail when they come in), so if you’re really interested in a topic, you can keep up with what other folks are saying.

You’ll still be able to register, and that’ll bypass (I think) the first-post-moderation step. It’ll also remove the requirement to put your name and e-mail address in every time you want to comment. And you’ll have a leg up if the spammers force me to the step of requiring registration.

Don’t worry about remembering all this, because I’ll give a full description of it again once the new format starts. We’re getting there!

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